Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't have any interest and don't have a business (perhaps you don't even know what that's), if you have email, you've experienced the more ugly side. You've probably seen the advertisements for email address lists that offer thousands-or even millions-of email addresses.
You may be certain of one thing: in the event the price is affordable, these are not opt-in lists. Instead, these tremendous lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They are comparable to a set of street addresses taken in the phone book. For target advertising purposes, they are pretty much useless-on a par with sales fliers addressed to “occupant.”
Mainly, the addresses are harvested from forums, membership or student lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, along with other places where folks gather to swap advice. They do not understand their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. They did not request to be added to a mass email list. And they definitely didn't ask to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Harvesting email addresses is legal. But it's widely considered unethical. You pay a fine or won't go to jail. However, you could damage your company, perhaps irreparably. The potential effects for violating the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range to having your business, from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain name.